Digital Ocean is a good solution if you want a self-hosted option.

If you use this referral link, you will get a $10 credit and I will get a referral bonus that helps keep the aresmush.com website up.

Creating a Droplet

“Droplet” is just what Digital Ocean calls a server. Once you have an account, here are the options you’ll need to select when creating your droplet:

  • Use the “Ubuntu” distribution image.
  • The smallest server size (512MB RAM) is adequate if you just want to run a single game. You can get a bigger size if you want to put other stuff on it.
  • Enter a hostname of your choice.
  • The other options can be left as the default.

You will be sent an email with your server’s IP address and the username/password of the root user.

You can connect to your server using the Digital Ocean website or a telnet application like PuTTY for Windows or Terminal telnet for Mac.

Getting a Domain Name

DigitalOcean only gives you an IP address. While that’s enough for your game to run, many games prefer to have a domain name too (like mymush.com).

You can get a domain name pretty cheap at Namecheap.com. Once you have one, follow this tutorial to point the main “A Record” of your domain at the IP address of your MUSH server. It may take a few hours for this to take effect, but then your domain will be set up.

Setting Up the Server

The root user is a special administrative account that’s created for you automatically. The password will be emailed to you.

These instructions will create a ‘mush’ user for your everyday use, and install some programs that PennMUSH needs.

adduser --disabled-password --gecos "" mush
apt-get update
apt-get install gcc
apt-get install libpcre3a
    If libpcre3a doesn't work, the next one should cover you.
apt-get install libpcre3-dev
apt-get install libssl-dev
apt-get install make
apt-get install emacs
apt-get install unzip
apt-get install build-essential
passwd mush
   Enter a password and write it down.  You'll need it in the next section.
usermod -a -G sudo mush

Installing PennMUSH

Now exit from the server and log in again with the ‘mush’ user and the password you just created.

git clone https://github.com/pennmush/pennmush.git
cd pennmush
git checkout 186p0
./configure
make update
make install

Note: This will install PennMUSH v1.8.6p0, which is the version that the code was most recently tested with. You can select any version, but try it at your own risk.

Installing the Code

Now your server is set up to install the code as described in Installation.

Setting Up the Wiki

The FS3 codebase has various built-in hooks to work with wikidot, a free wiki hosting service. The MU Wiki Template is a template you can use. Either copy the page code piecemeal, or use the “Clone This Site” button to copy the entire site and make it your own.